I have always thought of the dropsuits right now as the military versions. These are their builds that each faction has decided fits their needs. Whether those needs are constrained by monetary, form, or function.

Due to these and other things some should be "better" than others. Better being a relative term. But costs, fitting ability, and such may vary wildly (or not).

Given all that and the fact we have an extra level in dropsuit command. I always hoped we would see a suit that we could design ourselves. In simplest terms. You buy a suit you have X amount of "points" to work with. Adding slots or not can have different effects on cpu/pg, ewar, speed, and so on. This is from the getgo no modules or anything. You are making a suit for you not using the standard military suits.

I'm not going to derail your thread with more than that though. But in the end this would be teirecide at it's apex. Can't really have tiers if there is no real diffrence to start out.

Its more like having the same M-16 receiver but where you get the addon parts to it changes everything up about what it does its role and even what sort of gun registering you need for it.

You can under the right circumstances register an AR-15 (civvie m-16) as a pistol and its a highly functional indoor weapon.

The very same receiver can be then tweaked out to be a sniper.

Then there is quality of said parts. I can get a cheap made in china laser that breaks after I shoot once. Or I get the ones the swat teams rely on and lasts as long as the battery does.

But an Ar-15 is an Ar-15 is still an Ar-15.

With such a system...congratulations you have turned Dust into Blacklight : Retribution which sucks. Maybe tiecide would be good for the game eventualy, maybe not. I don't think it would be good for Dust at the moment because I think that currently there exists only 2 reasons to bother playing Dust 1. to grind SP 2. to play with friends. Tiercide takes away one of those reasons, maybe if Dust is ever a good game with interesting and varied game modes, large scale battles, connection to Eve etc... maybe then tiercide makes sense because Dust will have features that separate it from other games in the MMOFPS genre

I can see where this idea comes from good intentions, but I am not sure it could work without even more roles of suits.

I do not think it would fix things nearly as much as one would think. The main difference in people is not their suits, but in their thumbs. Yes the suit makes a difference, but people are lying to themselves when they do not admit many of these people in proto gear are naturally better anyway.

We would still see massive imbalance, and it would likely cause less diversity as people find out what role/suit is the best for getting a good KDR.

Let's try again.

What you wrote, implies that you have heard specific statements from CCP employees, along the lines that they LIKE having the power of massive gear level imbalances between players, therefore, gear restricted game modes will never be implemented.

True, or false?

Noone says "Oh man, I cant wait to grind out this weeks cap..."

If you tiericide, the only grind will be to improve the bonuses on your suit, but you wont be obligated to it just to be competitive. Itll also reduce "protostomping" and make the game more enjoyable for new players, who might decide to stick around instead of leaving after 2 matches.

LOL. Only suits need to get tiericide. Mods and weapons would remained tiered, as it is in EVE.

BPO suits would get ADV stats, and become the new miltia, regular suits get proto stats.

See, not that hard was it?